I recently had the life-changing experience of delivering my sister’s firstborn at our home. During my medical training at Cornell, I had delivered a handful of times—in the middle of urban ghettos and in hospitals catering to the more privileged in the ‘big city’. Surprisingly, my experience of working on the Labor and Delivery Unit did not change much across that spectrum of hospital settings. Simply stated, hospital delivery is a sterile and automated process.
With this in mind, my sister and her partner decided to have a home birth. Like the majority of young adults in California, they were medically uninsured. Her MediCal coverage would not pay for midwife or birthing center services. To complicate the matter, some midwives will only deliver in birthing centers, and birthing centers are few and far between. Sign-ups for birthing center space are done months in advance. If you are uninsured and unable to afford these services out of pocket (a few thousand dollars), you have only two choices: deliver at home or deliver in a hospital. Many women will choose to go through the hospital system because they are afraid to deliver at home without any medical professionals—and they have good reason to be. Labor is a completely unpredictable phenomenon. Thankfully, in our circle of friends, we had a doctor, midwife, and a doula—so we planned for a home delivery. The parents-to-be wanted the experience to be as organic and natural as the baby’s conception was.
My sister had a perfect delivery: the birth was twenty-some hours of positive sound energy, warm showers, rose water facecloths, fresh fruit, and Sanskrit chanting. With our loving care, she did not bleed, tear or require any pain medications. Unfortunately, we were unable to deliver the placenta as she had uterine atony (the uterine stops contracting), which is common among first time mothers with long labor. This is usually rectified by giving the mother hormones to induce uterine contraction. Since we did not have any drugs at home, and since there was a chance the placenta needed to be surgically removed, we took her to the hospital.
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